Had this been a normal year, Tuesday would mark the start of the NBA season, and we’d be watching the Mavericks raise their banner and seeing how the changes the Bulls would have made would help Derrick Rose. Instead, we’re mired in lockout limbo.

One of the interesting aspects of this labor impasse has been the way certain folks on both sides—some predictable, some not—have been demonized. Here on Halloween, it’s a good time to look at the biggest villains to emerge in this lockout.

David Stern. Stern has to bat leadoff in any list of bad guys in this lockout—being the bad guy at a time like this is part of his job. The total can be debated, but there is no question the league’s owners have, collectively, lost money in recent years, and that leaves Stern to deliver the bad news. Still, the tone of these negotiations was set back in January 2010 when the league delivered a draconian proposal for the new collective bargaining agreement to the players, which included a hard cap, non-guaranteed contracts and a total player pay cut of about 20 percent.

Stern has repeatedly patted himself on the back for getting owners to make “concessions” on those issues, but as union officials repeatedly point out, he shouldn’t get credit for making concessions on an impossible proposal. In the bigger picture, there is this: Of the four previous CBAs that Stern has negotiated, three have resulted in lockouts (although only two of those lockouts have resulted in lost games).

Derek Fisher. Fisher, like Stern, was almost predestined to be a villain here, either by players and agents who fear he would cave too easily to Stern, or by rank-and-file union members who want to see Fisher cut a deal so they can get back to work quickly. Sure enough, a FoxSports.com report this weekend outlined the fear of some players (OK, one player) that Fisher is getting too cozy with Stern, has broken with Hunter and is willing to accept a 50-50 split of basketball-related income (BRI), and that, essentially, he is not as smart as players like Steve Nash and Grant Hill. Of course, many around the league feel players would approve a 50-50 deal, so if Fisher is advocating that, he is merely doing his job. But again, he will be painted as a bad guy either way.

Dan Gilbert. Back in September, when hope for a full training camp and season was still lingering and the two sides were meeting in larger groups, a story broke claiming that two owners in particular—Phoenix’s Robert Sarver and Cleveland’s Dan Gilbert—had torpedoed progress by insisting owners take a hard line against players.

Gilbert, who has been known to make regrettable public rants in the past, went to Twitter and invented a new word, labeling the “bloggissists” who reported the story, “Sad & pathetic.” Then, on October 20, when it appeared that the sides were making progress under the watch of mediator George Cohen, Gilbert told Hunter that he shouldn’t worry about the details of a new system. “It was Dan Gilbert who said to me I should trust his gut,” a perplexed Hunter said. “And I said to him, ‘I can’t trust your gut. I trust my own gut.’”

Kevin Garnett.With hopes of saving Opening Night still running high, Garnett was among a group of stars who showed up for a meeting in New York on October 4. At one point in that meeting, the idea of bridging the gap on BRI by going with a 50-50 split cropped up, with the league wondering if the players would be willing to discuss it. Without consulting Hunter, Garnett—and fellow stars Kobe Bryant and Paul Pierce—said no. Which is an easy thing for a guy who has pulled in more than $200 million to do, but probably something that should be discussed with the rest of the union, too.

Paul Allen. In the same disastrous meeting in which Hunter was approached by Gilbert about his gut, Hunter was also surprised by the presence of Blazers owner Paul Allen, who had not been involved in previous talks. Everyone acknowledged that Allen did not speak, but union lawyer Jeffrey Kessler said afterwards that Allen had “hijacked” the meeting, indicating that his purpose there was to ensure that everyone in the room remember that hard-line owners were not willing to go above a 50 percent split. It was an odd stand for one the league’s freest spenders to make, and led to speculation that Allen was looking to sell the team.

The NBA went to Portland’s main paper, The Oregonian, to deny that, but even that did not go well—the league put a bizarre condition on speaking to the paper, insisting that the interview be done with a business reporter and not one of the reporters who regularly cover the team. An ESPN report later made it seem as though Kessler should be the villain here, because Allen was actually in the room to watch the notably combative lawyer work. Even if that was the case, Allen’s presence did not help.

Agents. As talks headed to what looked like would be either a happy conclusion or a bitter failure last Friday, one agent told Sporting News, “If this falls apart, you watch. Someone is going to blame us.” Indeed, in his post-meeting press conference, Stern pointed out that players would not budge on BRI because of pressure from agents. In reality, agents have backed out of the process since early October—predictions that they would push for decertification of the union or replacing Hunter have not come to fruition. But they still make a convenient scapegoat.

Kenyon Martin. For the most part, players have managed to avoid the kind of inflammatory quotes that turned public opinion against them during the last lockout, in 1998. But Martin, who signed to play in China without an out clause and is not technically a member of the union, railed against those who questioned his decision to play overseas, tweeting, “All haters should catch full blown Aids and Die!” That was actually one of the milder responses supposedly posted by Martin—some of which are too vulgar to repeat, even with euphemisms. Martin quickly removed the Twitter account and denied having sent the tweets.

Rashard Lewis, Gilbert Arenas, Elton Brand and Antawn Jamison. OK, you can’t really demonize players who are given big contracts, because in the end, overpaying is the fault of the owners who agree to the deals. But these four players are all on the league’s top 20 list in terms of salary, and clearly, they’re not worth the money they’re scheduled to be paid this year: $22.1 million for Lewis; $19.3 million for Arenas; $17 million for Brand; and $15 million for Jamison.

From the owners’ perspective, one of the main points of altering the NBA’s salary system is to make it easier for teams to escape long contracts for players who get injured and/or lose effectiveness. Consider that the players are holding firm at demanding 52 percent of BRI, while the owners are at 50 percent, a mere two-percent difference. Combine the salaries of Lewis, Arenas, Brand and Jamison, and you get $73.4 million—or about 1.8 percent of BRI.